The need to adequately mix fluids in various industrial processes is well known. Indeed, numerous reactors have been designed to uniformly distribute liquid and gaseous reactants in a reactor vessel. U.S. Pat. No. 1,491,049, for example, discloses a mixer for liquids which has a number of horizontally disposed plates in the vessel for dividing and recombining the fluid streams in the reactor to promote mixing.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,233,269 discloses a fluid flow distributor for mixing and distributing gases and liquids over the cross-section of a reactor vessel having an upward fluid flow path.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,313,680 discloses a reactor for mixing fluid components in which the reactor contains flow deflecting elements to divide and direct a body of fluid flow at an angle of approximately ninety degrees from the central axis of the reaction chamber.
From the foregoing examples, it is readily apparent that thought has been given to provide means for achieving adequate mixing of fluid streams in reactor vessels. Consideration has not been given, however, to the mixing of product streams emanating from these process vessels.
In commercial processes, the product streams emanating from these reactor vessels must be treated downstream in heat exchangers, separators, and similar process equipment. For example, in the isomerization of normal hydrocarbons, the product emanating from the isomerization reactor contains a mixture of iso-, cyclic and unconverted normal hydrocarbons. This stream is passed through an adsorber to adsorb unconverted normal hydrocarbons. The adsorbed normal hydrocarbons are then desorbed during a desorption cycle using hydrogen gas. The normal hydrocarbons that are desorbed during the desorption cycle are then recycled back to the isomerization reactor. Some of the hydrogen which is used during the desorption cycle is adsorbed by the adsorbent bed. Consequently, when the mixture of iso-, cyclic and unconverted normal hydrocarbons are sent through the adsorber during the adsorption cycles, the hydrogen that had been previously adsorbed during the desorption cycle gets entrained with the iso- and cyclic hydrocarbons, which causes sinusoidal variations in the product concentration. Due to these cyclic concentration variations, the molecular weight and enthalpy of the stream of iso- and cyclic hydrocarbons changes considerably, which results in drastic swings in the heat duty requirements of a downstream heat exchanger. In addition, furnaces used to heat adsorber feed are oversized and higher heat input is needed to overcome reduced heat recovery. This, of course, necessitates significant capital equipment and utility costs. Therefore, there remains a need for providing means for inhibiting cyclic concentration variations in gas and liquid streams by providing homogeneous fluid streams for reliable downstream processing operations.